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13 May 2009 5:03 PM

The Media flock try with all their might to save the Tories. Ever wondered why?

Hardened as I am to the absurd behaviour of the semi-official media, I have seldom heard or seen such an amazing collective missing of a major story - and such a collective effort to protect a public figure and a political party from harm - as has taken place in the last three days.

On Monday, and then again on Tuesday, a former Chairman of the Conservative Party urged Conservative voters to withdraw their votes from that party at the coming European Parliament elections.

Nor was this some titular figure of whom nobody had heard. It was Lord Tebbit, once known as Norman Tebbit, a much-celebrated former Cabinet Minister who - if the IRA had not severely injured him and even more severely hurt his wife during their attempt to massacre the entire Cabinet in Brighton - might well have become Prime Minister. Many of you will remember the moving (and typical) stoicism he displayed as he was rescued, agonisingly, from the ruins on live TV. Thanks to that same stoicism, few of you will know how much pain, physical and emotional, he has endured since, not least because it was his wife who suffered so much more than he. So I'll just mention it here. You may have guessed that I rather like him.

In fact I would go so far as to say that Lord Tebbit is probably the single most significant survivor of the Thatcher government, and the man who speaks most cogently for the traditional Conservative voter, still loyal, but increasingly dismayed and puzzled by his party's direction.

His decision (taken, I have no doubt, after much thought) to urge Tories to withhold their votes from the Tory Party is news by anybody's measure. It is somebody important doing something he is a) not expected to do and b) not supposed to do. I can confess that I tried very hard to make him do something of the kind when I interviewed him for my Channel Four programme about David Cameron. He wouldn't oblige. You can criticise your party from within, but to urge people not to vote for it tends to be an unforgivable sin and an expulsion offence.

Nor is it the result of a secret briefing, which can later be denied. It was done, more than once, on the record. The Daily Mail carried it on Tuesday morning, and the BBC Radio Four Today programme then got him to repeat it on air in a recorded interview - though in a bizarre mess-up which has caused the BBC some embarrassment, 'Today' managed to cut a crucial section out of its recording - the section in which Lord Tebbit made it clear that he also strongly (and rightly) advised voters to stay away from the repellent BNP rabble.

Yes, of course I rejoiced over this. For the first time, a genuine crack has appeared in the facade of the Tory Party, which all insiders know to be profoundly split. It appeared on the same day that a Populus Poll in The Times showed Tory and Labour support plummeting side by side as a result of the expenses revelations engulfing both parties.

There's been a lot of silly argument (familiar to me) about whether Lord Tebbit was secretly urging people to vote for UKIP. Why do people find it so hard to believe that not voting for your former party is itself a powerful political act, highly effective on its own, and that no alternative vote is necessary? Not voting can be an extremely potent form of protest.

More interesting is his very narrow condition - that his advice should apply only to the European vote, not to local elections or to the next General Election. Others will have to judge, or Lord Tebbit will have to say, whether this is a sustainable position, and whether disgust can be contained in so small an area. In fact it's quite clever, since the EU elections, being held under proportional representation and in regions, are much more open to changes in public opinion than first-past-the-post polls. If the Tories do unexpectedly badly, UKIP will be the beneficiaries whether Tory dissidents vote for them or not, and Lord Tebbit will be able to take credit for it (and take the blame and fury from the Cameroons). Lord Tebbit cannot fail to realise that, however narrow his specific advice is, a trickle of this kind can swiftly turn into a torrent. In current conditions, when the credit and standing of all established MPs is exhausted, who can say where it might end?

Why was this enormous story not at the very least near the top of every bulletin and every front page yesterday? Why was the bizarre non-story, that David Cameron was (understandably but predictably) trying to minimise the damage done by the revelations of his own party's greed, both pushed to the front and treated with such reverence. Why wouldn't he? It would have been news if he hadn't. It wasn't news that he did. It's his job and he is, after all, a PR man by profession. But this predictable and obvious action was treated as if he had single-handedly rescued a group of menaced women from the hands of the Janjaweed in Darfur, or scaled Kanchenjunga without oxygen.

Even the left-wing 'Independent' carried a leading article on Wednesday saying how decisive etc Mr Cameron had been. Had he? Had he sacked anyone? No. Was he himself super-clean? No. He had, in effect, ordered himself to pay back money he shouldn't have claimed for repairs to his conservatory. Conservatory? Honestly, how could anyone have ever thought it was the taxpayer's job to fix his conservatory? I shall return to this at the weekend, but it simply isn't a surprising or unexpected story that the leader of a wounded party seeks to stem the damage done to it by a swirling scandal. Gordon Brown was likewise seeking to stem the damage done to his party, but his efforts were rightly considered to be of minor importance and not specially impressive. Nor were Mr Cameron's. So why the difference in coverage?

My new book 'The Broken Compass', explains how political journalism operates in this country, and I do urge those who are interested to get hold of a copy. But in brief, two forces are operating here. One, the liberal elite actively wish for a Tory government, which they see as the best hope of safeguarding the left-wing policies of Blairism and two, many ambitious journalists have invested a great deal of time, and many lunches, in making close contacts with the Tory leadership. Now they want their pay-off, in the form of a future close relationship with a Tory government.

The other interesting story about Norman Tebbit is: ‘Why didn't David Cameron move to expel or at least suspend him from the Conservative Party?’

This is not explored because the answer is: ‘He didn't dare.’ And journalists in the liberal elite don't want to write such a story, as it reflects discredit on their chosen hero. Remember Michael Howard's disgraceful sacking of Howard Flight, or Mr Cameron's equally wrong dismissal of Patrick Mercer from his front bench, (both recently defended to me, very vigorously, by a certain Cameroon A-List candidate)? Norman Tebbit is much bigger than them, and remains a canny and quick-thinking political operator. In any fight between them, Cameron would end up looking like a callow teenager who'd tried to mug an elderly war veteran and been beaten off with a few blows of an umbrella. Also the truth - that Mr Cameron has hijacked the Tory Party for the liberal cause - would be shockingly evident. In my view, Lord Tebbit could actually have gone quite a lot further and got away with it. I hope he does.